Elias spun around. It was Silas, a man whose face looked like a map of every storm he’d survived. He was pointing a trembling finger at the horizon. "Look at the birds, boy."
The Air of Wave had come to claim the coast, and this time, it wasn't going back out to sea. Air of Wave - Suspense
Elias scrambled back, his boots slipping on the wet stone. He watched as Silas was hit first. The old man didn't fall. He was simply swept upward, his body suspended in the "wave" of air, drifting toward the clouds as if he were drowning in the sky. Elias spun around
Elias looked. A flock of gulls was frozen in mid-air, their wings locked, suspended in a pocket of shimmering, distorted air. They weren't flying; they were trapped in a ripple. The "Air of Wave" wasn't a tide of water—it was a tide of pressure, a localized distortion of physics that turned the atmosphere into a heavy, crushing liquid. "Look at the birds, boy
Suddenly, the humming stopped. The silence was deafening, a vacuum that sucked the breath from Elias’s lungs. The pressure dropped so fast his ears bled. Then, the horizon vanished.
Instead of the rhythmic crash of surf, there was only a rhythmic humming—a low-frequency vibration that rattled the marrow of his bones. This was the "Air of Wave," a local phenomenon the fishermen whispered about, usually right before they went missing.